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Automating a Romanian water treatment plant

27 June 2016

A distributed control system installed recently at a major water treatment facility in Romania consists of PLCs, industrial Ethernet switches, HMI, motor drives and around 1400 I/O points from Delta, which are helping to provide drinking water and wastewater treatment plant automation for a population of around 30,000 people.

The installation was devised by system integrator, Costruzioni Dondi SpA, and involved providing a distributed control system to principal plant processes such as pumping stations and water level monitoring equipment.

The control system architecture comprises supervisory, network and control layers. A SCADA system with two redundant servers provides data acquisition and archiving for the supervisory layer, as well as process control and monitoring services via remote control. In the network layer, Delta Managed Industrial Ethernet Switches with network redundancy technology and TCP/IP fibre optics (in ring topology network) are able to deliver tolerance to any network failures with a self-recovery time of less than 20ms. Here, data access protection is provided through a firewall. The actual control layer for local visualisation and operation is made up of three modular AH500 PLCs plus I/O modules, a DOP-B 7 colour touchscreen HMI, 1400 I/O points and CP2000 sensorless vector control (SVC) drives.

SVC is said to offer a timely response to load torque increase/decrease which satisfies customer requirements for load changes while enhancing motor performance and helping reduce energy consumption.

Commenting on the project, Valentin Tuturiga, project manager at Costruzioni Dondi, said: "The scalability of the modular Delta products was important, while the development software was provided free of charge. We also liked the ease of communication with Delta´s technical support team, who were able to help us whenever we required advice." The benefits for the water treatment plant have included higher productivity, reduced operating costs and better utilisation of staff with dependable process automation, communication and information management. This is in addition to easy control of pumping stations and monitoring of water levels. Furthermore, fast and efficient alarm management enables engineers to react quickly to failures and malfunctions, which in turn provides better environmental compliance and monitoring.

"The implementation of this project is a success and now serves as a model for other water treatment plants in Romania," concludes Tuturiga. "We have recently completed a further two installations and have just placed an order for Delta PLCs and inverters for another three projects."